Animated by the glasses of beer, during one of Arquimedes' silences
I finally dared ask the question that had been burning my throat for
the past three hours,
"They told me you have a daughter in Paris. Is that true,
Arquimedes?"
He sat looking at me, intrigued at my knowing intimate details
about his family. And gradually the expansive expression on his face
turned sour. Before answering he brushed his nose furiously and
with a crack of his hand chased away the invisible insect.
"I don't want to know anything about that heartless girl," he
growled. "And I want to talk about her even less, caballero. I swear,
even if she repented and came to see me, I'd slam the door in her
face."
When I saw how angry he was, I apologized for my impertinence.
I had heard about his daughter from one of the engineers this
morning, and since I lived in Paris too, I became curious and
wondered if I knew her. I wouldn't have mentioned it if I thought it
would irritate him.
Without responding at all to my explanations, Arquimedes kept
eating his sandwich and sipping his beer. Since he hardly had any
teeth, it was difficult for him to chew, and he made noises with his
tongue and took a long time to swallow each mouthful.
Uncomfortable with the long silence, convinced I had committed an
error by asking about his daughter—what were you expecting to
hear, Ricardito?—I raised my hand to call over the black woman in
rollers and ask for the check. And at that moment, Arquimedes
began talking again.
"Because she's an unfeeling girl, I swear," he declared, frowning
with a very severe expression. "She didn't send money even for her
mother's funeral. An egotist is what she is. She went over there and
turned her back on us. She must think she's moved up in the world
and that gives her the right to despise us now. As if she didn't carry
the blood of her father and mother in her veins."
He was in a rage. When he spoke he grimaced, and that wrinkled
his face even more. Again I murmured that I was sorry I had
brought up the subject, it hadn't been my intention to make him
angry, we ought to talk about something else. But he wasn't
listening to me. In his staring eyes the pupils were gleaming, liquid
and incandescent.
"I lowered myself and asked her to bring me over there when I
could have ordered her to, I'm her father after all," he said, banging
the table. His lips were trembling. "I lowered myself, I humbled
myself. She didn't have to support me, nothing like that. I'd work at
anything. Like helping to build breakwaters. Don't they build
breakwaters in Paris? Well, then, I could work doing that. If I'm
good here, why not there? The only thing I asked her for was a
ticket. Not for her mother, not for her brothers. Just for me. I'd
break my back, I'd earn and save and slowly bring over the rest of
the family little by little. Was that too much to ask? It was very little,
almost nothing. And what did she do? She never answered another
letter. Not one, ever again, as if the idea of seeing me turn up there
terrified her. Is that what a daughter does? I know why I say she
became an unfeeling girl, caballero."
The black woman in rollers approached the table, swinging her
hips like a panther, but instead of the check I asked her for another
cold bottle of beer. Old Arquimedes had spoken so loudly that
people at several tables turned to look at him. When he realized this
he apologized, coughed, and lowered his voice.
"At first she did remember her family, I have to say that too.
Well, only once in a while, but something's better than nothing," he
continued more calmly. "Not when she was in Cuba; there, it seems,
because of political things, she couldn't write letters. At least, that's
what she said later, when she went to live in France and was already
married. And then yes, from time to time, for the Patriotic Festival,
or my birthday, or Christmas, she'd send a letter and a check. What a
mess trying to cash it. Taking identity papers to the bank, and the
bank charging I don't know how much in commissions. But in those
days, though it didn't happen too often, she remembered she had a
family. Until I asked her for the ticket to France. That's when she
cut it off. Never heard from her again. Not to this day. As if all her
relatives had died. She buried us, I tell you. She didn't bother to
answer even when one of her brothers wrote asking for help to put
up a marble tombstone for their mother."
I poured Arquimedes a glass of the foaming beer that the black
woman in rollers had just brought, and I poured another for myself.
Cuba, married in Paris: no doubt about it. Who else could it be? Now
I started to tremble. I felt uneasy, as if some terrible revelation
would emerge at any moment. I said, "Cheers, Arquimedes," and we
both took a long drink. From where I was sitting I could see one of
the old man's sneakers, full of holes, and a bony ankle, scabbed or
dirty, where an ant was crawling that he didn't seem to feel. Was a
coincidence like this possible? Yes, it was. I had no doubt about that
now.
"I think I met her once," I said, pretending I was talking just to
make conversation and had no personal interest. "Your daughter
was on a scholarship to Cuba for a while, wasn't she? And then she
married a French diplomat, right? A gentleman named Arnoux, if
I'm not mistaken."
"I don't know if he was a diplomat or what, she never even sent a
photograph," Arquimedes grumbled, brushing his nose. "But he was
an important Frenchy and he earned good money, that's what they
said. In a case like that, doesn't a daughter have obligations to her
family? Especially if her family is poor and suffering hardships."
He took another sip of beer and was lost in thought for a long
time. Some chicha-fueled music, off-key and monotonous, sung by
Los Shapis, replaced the salsa. At the table to the side, the
electricians were talking about Sunday's horse races and one of
them swore: "Cleopatra's a sure thing in the third." Suddenly,
remembering something, Arquimedes raised his head and stared at
me with feverish eyes.
"You knew her?"
"I think so, vaguely."
"That guy, the Frenchy, he had a lot of money, didn't he?"
"I don't know. If we're talking about the same person, he was a
functionary at UNESCO. A good position, no doubt about it. Your
daughter, the times I saw her, was always very well dressed. She was
a good-looking, elegant woman."
"Otilita always dreamed about what she didn't have, ever since
she was little," Arquimedes said suddenly, sweetening his voice and
breaking into an unexpected smile full of indulgence. "She was very
lively, at school she won prizes. And she had delusions of grandeur
from the day she was born. She was never resigned to her fate."
I couldn't control my laughter, and the old man looked at me,
disconcerted. Lily the Chilean girl, Comrade Arlette, Madame Robert
Arnoux, Mrs. Richardson, Kuriko, and Madame Ricardo Somocurcio
was, in reality*, named Otilia. Otilita. How funny.
"I never would have imagined her name was Otilia," I explained.
"I met her under another name, her husband's, Madame Robert
Arnoux. That's what they do in France, when a woman marries she
takes her husband's first and last names."
"People's ways are funny," remarked Arquimedes, smiling and
shrugging. "Has it been a long time since you saw her?"
"A long time, yes. I don't even know if she still lives in Paris. If
she's the same person, obviously. The Permian girl I'm telling you
about had been in Cuba and got married there, in Havana, to a
French diplomat. Then he took her to live in Paris, in the 1960s.
That's where we saw each other the last time, it must be four or five
years ago. I remember she talked a lot about Miraflores, she said she
spent her childhood in that neighborhood."
The old man nodded. In his watery eyes, nostalgia had displaced
fury. He held up the glass of beer and blew at the foam around the
edge, slowly, evening it out.
"That's her," he declared, nodding several times as he brushed
his nose. "Otilita lived in Miraflores when she was little because her
mother worked as a cook for a family who lived there. The Arenas
family."
"On Calle Esperanza?" I asked.
The old man nodded, staring at me in surprise. "You know that
too? How come you know so many things about Otilita?"
I thought, How would he react if I said: Because she's my wife?
"Well, as I said. Your daughter always remembered Miraflores
and the little house on Calle Esperanza. It's a neighborhood where I
lived as a boy too."
Behind the counter, the black woman in rollers was following the
dislocated beat of Los Shapis, moving her head from side to side.
Arquimedes took a long drink and was left with a ring of foam
around his sunken lips.
"Since she was this high, Otilita felt ashamed of us," he said,
frowning again. "She wanted to be like the whites, the rich people.
She was a smart-alecky kid, very crafty. Pretty smart, but always
taking risks. Not everybody can move to another country without a
cent, like she did. Once she won a contest, on Radio America.
Imitating Mexicans, Chileans, Argentines. I don't think she could
have been more than nine or ten years old. They gave her a pair of
skates for a prize. She conquered the family where her mother
worked as a cook. The Arenas family. She won them over, I tell you.
They treated her like a member of the family. They let her be friends
with their own daughter. They spoiled her. After that she was even
more ashamed of being the daughter of her own mother and father.
I mean, from the time she was little you could see how she'd turn
her back on her family when she was grown."
Suddenly, at this point in the conversation, I began to feel a little
sick. What was I doing here, sticking my nose into these sordid,
intimate details? What else did you want to know, Ricardito? What
for? I began to look for an excuse to say goodbye, because without
warning the Chim Pum Callao had turned into a prison cell.
Arquimedes went on talking about his family. Everything he said
made me sadder and more depressed. Apparently he had a slew of
children, by three different women, "all of them recognized." Otilita
was the oldest daughter of his first wife, now deceased. "Feeding
twelve mouths can kill you," he repeated with a resigned expression.
"It wore me out. I don't know how I still have the strength to earn
my bread, caballero." In fact, he did look exhausted and frail. Only
his eyes, lively and strong, showed a will to go on; the rest of his
body seemed defeated and fearful.
It must have been two hours at least since we came into the
Chim Pum Callao. All the tables were empty except ours. The owner
turned off the radio, suggesting it was time to close, I asked for the
check, paid it, and when we walked out, I asked Arquimedes to
accept a gift of a hundred-dollar bill.
"If you ever run into Otilita again over there in Paris, tell her to
remember her father and not be such a bad daughter, or in the next
world they might punish her." The old man extended his hand.
He stood looking at the hundred-dollar bill as if it had fallen
from the sky. He was so moved, I thought he was going to cry. He
stammered, "A hundred dollars! God bless you, caballero." I
thought, What if I told him: You're my father-in-law, Arquimedes,
can you believe it?
I waited for a while on Plaza Jose Galvez, and when a dilapidated
taxi finally appeared and I signaled it to stop, a swarm of ragged
children surrounded me, hands outstretched, asking for money. I
told the driver to take me to Calle Esperanza, in Miraflores.
On the long ride in the clattering jalopy that was belching smoke,
I regretted having instigated the conversation with Arquimedes. I
felt sad down to the marrow of my bones when I thought about what
Otilita's childhood must have been like in one of those Callao
shantytowns. Knowing it was impossible for me to approach a
reality so remote from the Miraflores life I had been lucky enough
to experience, I imagined her as a little girl, in the crowding and
grime of the hovels thrown up somehow on the banks of the
Rimac—as we drove past them, the taxi filled with flies—where
dwellings were intermingled with pyramids of garbage accumulating
there for who knows how long, and I imagined each day's want,
precariousness, insecurity, until, providential gift, the mother
obtained a job as cook for a middle-class family in a residential
neighborhood and managed to bring along her oldest daughter. I
imagined the artfulness, the flattery, the charm used by Otilita, the
girl endowed with an exceptionally well-developed instinct for
survival and adaptation, until she had won over the lady and
gentleman of the house. First they would have laughed at her, then